Villagers Shooting out their Rubbish

In this hand-coloured etching, red-faced rural laborers gleefully wheel three figures — a lawyer, a physician, and a corpulent clergyman — out of the village in wooden barrows, the caption reading Villagers Shooting out their RUBBISH. Cruikshank renders the professional classes as bloated, hapless dead weight, their bulging noses and slack jaws drawn with the exaggerated physiognomy then read as class ridicule rather than ethnic slur — grotesque but targeted at privilege, not ethnicity. The fluid line and acidic wit place this squarely in the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of English print satire: single-sheet etchings sold cheaply, meant to be read fast and laughed at hard. That tradition — sequential implied narrative, speech compressed into image, bodies as argument — fed directly into the comic strip formats that followed decades later.